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China Science

One-Quarter of World's Pigs Died In a Year Due To Swine Fever In China (nytimes.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the cause-and-effect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The [African swine fever disease] was first reported in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in early August 2018. By the end of August 2019, the entire pig population of China had dropped by about 40 percent. China accounted for more than half of the global pig population in 2018, and the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world's pigs. By late September, the disease had cost economic losses of one trillion yuan (about $141 billion), according to Li Defa, dean of the College of Animal Science and Technology at China Agricultural University in Beijing. Qiu Huaji, a leading Chinese expert on porcine infectious diseases, has said that African swine fever has been no less devastating "than a war" -- in terms of "its effects on the national interest and people's livelihoods and its political, economic and social impact."

Much like severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, exposed the shortcomings of China's public health system when it became an epidemic in 2002-3, swine fever today exposes the weaknesses of the country's animal-disease prevention and control. But it also reveals something much more fundamental: notably, the perverse effects that even sound regulations can have when they are deployed within a system of governance as unsound as China's. According to Yu Kangzhen, a deputy minister of agriculture, the localities that struggled to control the spread of African swine fever were also those that lacked staff, funding or other resources in animal-epidemic prevention. Yet that alone cannot explain the breadth of the epidemic or the speed with which it swept across China...
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One-Quarter of World's Pigs Died In a Year Due To Swine Fever In China More

One-Quarter of World's Pigs Died In a Year Due To Swine Fever In China

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  • It spread because of gangsters - really (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday January 02, 2020 @11:50PM (#59581226)

    Turns out a big factor in the massive spread of swine flu was organized crime in China [businessinsider.com].

    Summary - criminals drop the virus into pig farms via drones, buy the infected pigs cheap, then sell the meat elsewhere at a profit (ignoring laws that say you can't transport infected meat because, hey, criminals again).

    • How was this info not in the summary?

      • Re:It spread because of gangsters - really (Score:5, Interesting)

        by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Friday January 03, 2020 @02:52AM (#59581444)
        I wouldn't take it too seriously, it's not business insider's original story. Some years ago there was quite a lot of damage done by African swine fever over here. In hindsight it was figured out that the main vector of spreading the disease were diligent health and safety inspectors going from farm to farm checking if the animals were healthy(they didn't stay healthy for long after the visits). The key to large scale animal farming and not getting your farm wiped out by a disease is quarantine measures. Nobody just gets to just waltz inside. Nobody goes from farm to farm without full hazmat treatment and complete change of clothes. And the handlers that do care for the animals daily don't go to any bloody tropical vacations, it's basically a job requirement now.

      • You're on dashslot and feel the need to ask a "why" question about dashslot? You must be new here.

      • Read the link and you'll see why. As usual SuperKendall goes full retard with his interpretation of a story, reverses the causality to make it look like one group was the cause when the article makes no mention of it, all the while quoting the Chinese government as the only source of information.

        A better question is "How was it that his post got modded up?"

        • Read the link and you'll see why. As usual SuperKendall goes full retard with his interpretation of a story, reverses the causality to make it look like one group was the cause when the article makes no mention of it, all the while quoting the Chinese government as the only source of information.

          A better question is "How was it that his post got modded up?"

          Probably the same way I can make a reply to someone's question and it gets modded redundant. SuperKendall has a few sugardaddies out there.

          We get our fans, and we get our stalkers. It's the price of internetz fame I suppose. ;^)

    • A sad day for Wilbur and Charlotte.

    • Turns out a big factor in the massive spread of swine flu was organized crime in China [businessinsider.com].

      No. It wasn't a big factor. It was a tiny factor and your causality is arse backwards. Organised crime profited of an existing epidemic. They weren't a big factor in spreading the epidemic.

      Please learn to read.

      Summary - criminals drop the virus into pig farms via drones

      No. Your summary is based on a few isolated cases. Why not quote the whole sentence you surmised: "in more extreme cases they are using drones to drop infected items into farms"

      Also good work parroting without verification the claims of the Chinese media. You're check's in the mail.

      • No. It wasn't a big factor. It was a tiny factor and your causality is arse backwards. Organised crime profited of an existing epidemic.

        Now do you and the Slashdot summary.

        You can't say any more than I can which is primary. But I can say that an epidemic has not been that large before despite similar factors that the story listed in other countries.

        With the only remaining variable being the organized crime vector...

        Learn to think more better.

        • Now do you and the Slashdot summary.

          Why? You didn't quote the Slashdot summary. You quoted an article and clickbaited a single line from it into fake news. And this summary doesn't in any way refute that.

          You can't say any more than I can which is primary.

          No. I'm specifically saying less, i.e. not making up shit like you are.

          With the only remaining variable being the organized crime vector...

          Seriously? You're an adult on nerd news website. Try and not apply the logic an thought processes of 5 year old to a complex topic.

          Learn to think more better.

          WOW! I used to think of you as a troll, but I honestly now just believe you're an absolute moron.

  • ... and less people surveillance.

    As advanced as the country is in so many ways, the regime still thinks like a developing country.

  • We have vaccinations for human flu, why don't we have vaccinations for closely-related swine flu? Especially when losses are "141 billion dollars," the vaccine would more than pay for itself.

    We're trying to breed crops that are "naturally" (or maybe: fundamentally) resistant to so many issues, why don't we properly treat cattle? We inject them with antibiotics just to get them to grow, why not vaccines to prevent them from being sick? (Remember: vaccines train the body's immune system to recognize and rejec

    • Re:Vaccinations? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Friday January 03, 2020 @04:20AM (#59581528)

      We have vaccinations for human flu, why don't we have vaccinations for closely-related swine flu? Especially when losses are "141 billion dollars," the vaccine would more than pay for itself.

      We're trying to breed crops that are "naturally" (or maybe: fundamentally) resistant to so many issues, why don't we properly treat cattle? We inject them with antibiotics just to get them to grow, why not vaccines to prevent them from being sick? (Remember: vaccines train the body's immune system to recognize and reject the virus -- their intent isn't to stay in your body for your whole life.)

      Antibiotics have no effect on viruses. The Chinese ruined several anti-viral drugs that should have been used sparingly in a targeted way by feeding them willy nilly in large quantities to domestic animals where they had little to no effect other than to train the virus to become immune to the drugs. Vaccination of domestic animals only reduces the quantity of a virus excreted by the animals it does not completely solve the problem. Improved hygene is important as is training and risk awareness. That having been said there is always some brainless anti-vaxxer farmer with streak of anti-gubbermint libertarianism who disregards all this on priniciple and thus acts as a disease incubator.

    • We have vaccinations for human flu, why don't we have vaccinations for closely-related swine flu?

      You can't vaccinate after the fact. You can't vaccinate quickly enough to prevent the spread of an epidemic. Also you can't vaccinate against all strands of the flu.

      Human vaccination is carefully prepared guesswork based on statistics and a bit of guesswork. There are then many months of production to prepare the vaccine. Vaccination isn't the solution to an already spreading epidemic, and you can see the guesswork go wrong every few years with "particularly bad flu seasons" where the predominant strain end

    • Vaccinations for human flu are tragically flawed. Something similar for swine flu would be no better.

    • Re:Vaccinations? (Score:5, Informative)

      by clovis ( 4684 ) on Friday January 03, 2020 @10:56AM (#59582126)

      We have vaccinations for human flu, why don't we have vaccinations for closely-related swine flu?

      Human flu, or influenza, is an RNA virus. African swine flu is a double stranded DNA virus. The two viruses are as different as could possibly be.
      Development of a vaccine is well under way, but it won't be easy because ASFV is very complex for a virus. ASF only recently got to China.
      It had spread through Europe, but was eradicated by the usual quarantine and kill methods.

      There is a similar historic case, and that is the elimination of rinderpest by vaccine. Look it up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kbahey ( 102895 )

      We have vaccinations for human flu, why don't we have vaccinations for closely-related swine flu? Especially when losses are "141 billion dollars," the vaccine would more than pay for itself.

      The human flu vaccine does not work too well. This is because it has to be re-done by labs every single year, based on projections on what strains will be dominant. So there is some guess work, and it is never 100% effective (like, say, measles). Some years, it is only 40% effective (which is better than nothing, but in

  • This pigs were going to die anyway. So if it's not dangerous to people,just make the sausage. What am I missing?

  • ASF is no joke (Score:5, Informative)

    by bruceki ( 5147215 ) on Friday January 03, 2020 @04:18AM (#59581524)
    Very small quantities of infected material can cause an outbreak. Even dirt adhering to tires. The virus persists in cured pork products for months - like salami and ham. Infected pigs die at 90%, but even those that survive are susceptible to re-infection. Affected farms have a very hard time cleaning and disinfecting well enough to eradicate the virus; you basically have to have a facility designed to be sterilized and use all-in all-out techniques. Feed mills that serve multiple farms are vectors for the disease, as are inspectors and other service people. People aren't getting this, but can spread it. I think it's pretty safe to say that ASF is now endemic in asia.

  • If this gets to the US, we may lose up to 80% of Trump supporters.

  • The story was that the much feared and universally despised Dear Leader of a smallish country was visiting a farm.
    There he saw an enormous and very healthy pig. Therefore he told the peson in charge of the farm that he had never seen such an impressive specimen and he will have to be personally informed on a daily basis of how the pig was doing.
    One day a farm worker finds the pig dead. Everyone is terrified to inform the person in charge, so task fallls to the village idiot.
    He goes to inform the head of th

  • Most pigs are slaughtered within a year of birth anyway; 18 months is pretty long. So it's a hit for a season of pork, but not much beyond that.

  • I think most of swine decline was culling not deaths caused by the flu itself. I think the birth to death of a hog is something like 6mths anyways. So technically most of those pigs would be dead regardless, just they weren't replaced by new piglets at the rate that they were culled.

    • My bad no actual virus caused deaths not culling. Most of the stories I recall recently all said stuff like 5k hogs being culled to prevent the spread ... or whatever but maybe different outbreak.

      • Culling potentially infected animals is usually what you want to do, if you fail to do so on time you end up in a situation where quarter of worlds pigs croak on you.

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